The proposed research is to be exploratory in nature. Our primary objectives: a. to explore in a systematic and comprehensive manner the relationship between social and economic status, ethnicity, food habits, body size preference, psychosocial stress and blood pressure level; b. to introduce and validate some new research instruments for achieving the above objective. The comprehensive nature of the proposed study necessitates new instruments and modifications of old ones; c. to explore the role of common residence as an etiologic-diagnostic unit; d. to explore the feasibiliy of the household network as an etiologic-diagnostic unit; e. from this exploratory effort, to develop an appropriately intensive and systematic methodology that can be easily applied to large study samples; f. to provide baseline data for the development of a hypertension family education project. Intensive data collection will be carried out on 8 core households and 40 households within the networks of the 8 core so as to assess households and networks as socio-cultural environments in which food habits, reactions to stress, and body size considerations are shared. From these intensive data a master instrument will be developed and administered to 200 randomly selected households. The sampling procedure will yield subsamples of 100 hypertensive households (at least one adult hypertensive present) and 100 non-hypertensive households.